The Structure of the Worldview in Vietnamese Folk Festivals

Abstract

This article examines how Vietnamese folk festivals enact and transmit worldview through ritual practice, symbolic form, and social participation. It uses a qualitative comparative design based on fifteen purposively selected cases across northern, central, and southern Vietnam, together with twelve semi-structured interviews involving organizers, ritual specialists, artisans, cultural officers, elders, women, and younger participants. The study develops a Vietnamese festival worldview model through an abductive sequence that moves between scholarship on ritual and culture, concepts drawn from Vietnamese philosophical traditions, and recurring patterns in the empirical corpus. The model distinguishes worldview content—cosmological ordering, humanistic–relational values, and social order—from ritual mediation, lived and transmissive effects, and contemporary negotiation. It was assessed through staged coding, cross-case comparison, source triangulation, and examination of disconfirming material rather than through statistical model testing. The findings show that the model is useful when treated as a disciplined interpretive procedure, not as a universal description of all Vietnamese festivals. Ritual meanings vary with local history, religious repertoire, livelihood, stakeholder position, and the pressures of heritage-making, tourism, and commercialization. The article’s theoretical contribution lies in clarifying how locally grounded philosophical categories can be translated into empirically accountable analytical relations without reducing festivals to either symbolic inventories or fixed national traits.