Silent Dissent and Embodied Memory: Reframing Community Participation in Vietnam’s Peri-Urban Heritage

Abstract

In rapidly urbanizing peri-urban zones of Vietnam, heritage is not simply preserved—it is contested, reframed, and at times, quietly resisted. This study investigates how communities in Hoai Duc, a transitional district on the edge of Hanoi, engage in extra-institutional heritage negotiations that defy dominant models of participation and development. Drawing on 312 surveys and 15 in-depth interviews, the study identifies not only generational and symbolic stratifications within the community, but also affective and embodied forms of participation—including ritual withdrawal, selective silence, and gendered memory practices often ignored in heritage policy. Challenging the ideal of consensus-driven community-based heritage management (CBHM), the research introduces the CHD (Community–Heritage–Development) model as a critical heuristic that exposes hidden asymmetries and symbolic exclusions in heritage governance. Anchored in postcolonial theory, ethics of care, and epistemic disobedience, this model reframes heritage not as a fixed legacy, but as an unstable infrastructure of memory—a shifting, fragmentary system of tangible and intangible elements whose meanings are continually renegotiated amid social inequality (Saputra, 2024). In Hoai Duc, this appears when residents withdraw from communal worship after undesired restoration or move ancestral rites to private spaces—negotiated through friction, stratification, and dissent. The findings highlight that in the Global South, especially in urbanizing peripheries, community agency manifests not through formal dialogue but through moral, embodied, and affective practices. As such, this article calls for a rethinking of participatory heritage frameworks to accommodate symbolic resistance, informal knowledge systems, and the performative ethics of local memory-making.