Tam Ngô: As a social anthropologist, I build my theoretical framework on a wide range of ethnographic settings. Two clusters of theoretical concepts that are important in my research agenda are:
Necropolitics and necrosociality
In my current work, I am concerned with the aftermath of war, and in particular with war dead. I use twin concepts: necrosociality and necropolitics. The first refers to the social relations between the dead and the living as well as the cultural perceptions of these relations. This includes the handling of the bones of war dead and the world of the spirits. The second is the political management of the war dead which is fundamental to the sovereignty of the state. This includes the finding and retrieval of the Missing in Action, the building of war cemeteries, and the public rituals surrounding the war dead. My work examines the interactions between necrosociality and necropolitics. It is focused on South-East Asia, but the conceptual issues involved are also relevant elsewhere.
War pollution: Environment justice and ecological decolonization
Another concern of mine is the aftermath of Ecocide. Coined three decades ago, Ecocide refers to the wars in which the environment of the enemy is destroyed and rendered unlivable decades if not centuries after the war ended. In analyzing war pollution one can distinguish three kinds of narrative: a critique of modernity (of human destructive creativity with its polluting war technology), a moral narrative of war and its impact, and a developmental narrative of urgency (to clean and clear the environment of war remnants). While war's impact on the environment is well-documented, it is curiously underrepresented in transitional justice and postwar reparation as well as in the wider environmental concerns of today. Given its long-lasting nature, it is pertinent to ask how war-resulted environmental pollution continues to impact individuals and society trying to rebuild life on war’s footprints and how coping with toxic and explosive legacies of war is not only a local concern with preventing a recurring circle of violence but also a global moral obligation towards people and their environment. Despite some recent efforts of anthropologists, we still know very little about how people who live in landscapes, sometimes permanently damaged by war, cope with the dangers buried in the land. Much less is known about how communities whose bodies have been contaminated by toxic chemicals may carry an uncertain genetic future. My ambition is to build a comparative research project with three foci: 1) To place war in the centre of the Anthropocene; 2) To theorize the local-global power and moral hierarchies that characterize the current practice and politics of remediation and detoxication in the postwar societies; 3) To ethnographically illuminate the necropolitics in the governing of, caring for, and repairing wounded places and wounded population.
Most relevant publications:
Ngô, T. T. T., P. van der Veer and D. Smyer Yu. 2015. “Religion and peace in Asia.” In The Oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding, edited by R. Scott Appleby, A. Omer, and D. Little. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ngô, T. T. T. 2020. “Dynamics of Memory and Religious Nationalism in a Sino-Vietnamese Border Town.” Modern Asian Studies 54 (3): 795-829.
Ngô, T. T. T. 2021. “Bones of contention.” American Ethnologist 48: 192-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13015
Ngô, T. T. T. and S. Wagner. 2023. “Special issue introduction: Actions for the missing: scientific and vernacular forms of war dead accounting.” Human Remains and Violence 9(2): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.7227/HRV.9.2.1>
Ngô, T. T. T. 2024. “The tombs of wind (Những ngôi mộ giό): The enigmas of empty graves, encrypted archives and porous bones.” Human Remains and Violence 10(1): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.7227/HRV.10.1.1>
“Last visit to my brother”. Photographed by collaborator, Journalist Phan Tan Lam, based in Quang Tri province who works with me on a project in which family whose DNA testing failed to produce a match to the remains in graves that they are convinced to be of their missing loved ones bring a face, a photograph to claim the grave instead.