Consuming Loc—Creating On: Women, Offerings and Symbolic Capital in Northern Vietnam by Alexander Soucy

In his article about the social functions of loc in Vietnam, Alexander Soucy argues that while loc serves a spiritual role in the lives of women, there is also a crucial social role that it plays as a way for women to strengthen relationships and improve on their social standing. Soucy’s guiding concept for this argument is Bourdeiu’s “symbolic capital,” in which gifts partake in an economy of reciprocity to gain social standing. 

Loc can be found in almost every Vietnamese religious tradition, but its definition is elusive because of its many functions and “cross-cultural etymology” (109). Soucy combines the partial definitions of “happiness,” “talisman,” and “gift of the gods” to approximate how the offering functions in benefitting the giver and receiver, its practical uses, and its connection to the supernatural. Loc, at least during the Lunar New Year, is defined by a web of money, luck, and happiness, where giving monetary gifts is a celebration of longevity. The first business during the new year is also received as loc and treated as good luck for the coming year. Loc also exists in more explicitly sacred places, such as during pilgrimages. In these cases, loc  can be food offerings or souvenirs and gain in power through connection to sacred sites. Some sacred places are designed specifically for loc; The Lady of the Storehouse is a shrine where businesspeople take objects from the shrine for good luck in business and later repay their debt with interest, a practice that has increased in popularity since Vietnam’s transition to a free-market economy in the 1980s (113). During Len Dong, some loc cannot be given away, and its potency is relative to the importance of the spirit (114). 

Soucy goes on to define the qualities of loc as 1) hope of happiness in the future, 2) innately powerful, and 3) something transferable. While offerings are conferred their power in relation to the supernatural, benefits from receiving and giving offerings is worldly. Loc contributes to the Vietnamese religious tendency to “revel in money and business and affirm an essential goodness in material wealth,” with religion seen as a legitimate means of attaining it (116). Secondly, the power of loc is innate, not located in the faith of the giver or recipient, enabling benefits even for the skeptic. Lastly, the power of the offering is usually maintained through giving.  
 

Soucy’s most important contribution to the discussion around loc is the culture of social reciprocity it creates, weaving gender, social structures, and gift-giving together. He notes that women’s central role of creating a happy family and being a care-giver enables the function of gift-giving. Making religious offerings is considered to be feminine because the religious is considered superstitious. Men scorn superstition as weak, thinking that those who need supernatural assistance cannot control their own lives without help. Soucy is quick to point out that this gendered argument is solely rhetorical, but it pushes women toward loc and also fits within Vietnamese gender norms. “Weak” women who are “superstitious” are seen as more feminine and thus more marriageable. 

Before concluding, Soucy turns to his main focus of giving loc to tighten social bonds and create social capital. Like in China, gift-giving by women to family and friends in Vietnam is seen as self-sacrifice; the self-sacrifice is symbolic of the importance the gift-giver places on the recipient, and the literal sacrifice of the loc confers direct benefits for the recipient. Within Vietnam’s familial structure, filial piety is incredibly important. The “polite particle” of on is used for elders or for those whom you are indebted to. These slight imbalances create social capital for those who are higher, and they ensure maintained (and friendly) connection so that these small debts can be reciprocated. Because women have to create this feeling of indebtedness among their immediate family, they cultivate on through gift-giving to their husbands and children. Thus women empower themselves within the gender system, not outside of it.

Soucy makes a compelling argument for the social uses of loc within gendered social systems. Despite keeping spirituality in the background, he always ties the spiritual origins of loc into the social worlds it occupies, bringing the blessings of Buddhas into the physical passage of monetary wealth. He also draws the spiritual benefit into everyday life by positing the “worldly” impact of gift-giving, revealing how Vietnamese religious traditions resist Buddhist temperance around material wealth. 

I’m particularly fascinated by loc as an instrument of hegemonic gender structures. Gift-giving both reinforces masculine conceptions of femininity as weak and superstitious while allowing women to win social capital within the same system. I wish that Soucy, after discussing the gender politics of marriageability, would have commented on how loc plays into gender dynamics before marriage. Do mothers teach their daughters to give gifts publicly or to potential suitors? If so, are these practices ritualized? I also wish that Soucy had included more anecdotes in his ethnography. Aside from an opening story, he mostly sticks to case studies and larger surveys. I would have liked to have followed a few women through their relationship with loc. I was also curious about the history of loc. Soucy presents gift-giving as a part of Vietnamese tradition that has resisted the incursions of Buddhism. Is loc older than Buddhism? And Soucy mentions both the Vietnamese transition to a free-market economy (112) and the influence of China in practices and socio-religious thought. How much has the emphasis on material wealth changed since globalization and neoliberalism? What is China’s political and religious influence on Vietnam, and has that changed how loc operates?

Questions

1. How do the “supernatural” aspects of loc affect its social role among women?

2. Does loc give women power in Vietnamese society if it also reinforces gender stereotypes and imbalances?   

Quotes: 

1. “Through their distribution, these items serve in a very important way to cement relational bonds within families and between friends. For this reason, loc reaches out beyond the confines of strictly religious practice, even to affect the lives of men who remain sceptical or derogatory of religion” (108).

2. “Because making offerings and more general religious participation is considered to bring luck to the family, the act of making offerings on the part of women is a demonstrative action that shows that they are taking care of their family and are therefore “good” women” (126).