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Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery.印度支那。An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954.Berkeley:加利福尼亚大学出版社，2009年。XV + 490页。60.00美元（布），ISBN 978-0-520-24539-6。
评论者：Bruce Lockhart (新加坡国立大学历史系)
发表于H-HistGeog(2011年4月)
受Eva M. Stolberg（德国杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）的委托
解开印度支那殖民地的含混之处
印度支那。La colonisation ambiguë, 1858-1954 (Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization) 是以任何语言出版的关于印度支那殖民地的最重要和最权威的研究之一，现在该书已提供给英语读者。该书由越南殖民时期最重要的两位历史学家Pierre Brocheux和Daniel Hémery撰写，（1995年首次以法语出版）是仅有的几本将印度支那殖民时期作为单一实体进行研究的学术专著之一，也是极少数结合政治、经济和社会视角的专著之一。与大多数印度支那研究一样，该书的大部分讨论都是关于越南的，但也有足够的关于柬埔寨和老挝的信息--其中一些是根据最近的学术研究添加到英译本中的--以使该研究合理地 "涵盖整个印度支那"。尽管对量化数据的强烈强调意味着，在一本严格意义上不是经济史的书中，文本中的数字比一些读者可能想要的更多，但这些事实和数字从头到尾都很好地融入了对殖民时代的广泛叙述中。
Brocheux和Hémery在其序言中为该书制定了几个主要目标。首先，他们 "选择将印度支那作为一种历史建构......植根于......半岛社会和人类学空间的紧张和动态之中"。其次，如上所述，他们 "通过印度支那的多个维度--政治和军事、经济、社会和文化--以及各种时间性，"包括殖民统治时期和 "非殖民化的短暂、暴力的断裂 "来研究印度支那。最后，他们试图超越 "殖民 "历史学视角与反殖民和民族视角之间的二分法，前者将法国的统治 "从根本上说是文明的，即使是有缺陷的"，后者则将其描绘为 "纯粹的统治、压迫和剥削"（第xiv-xv页）。
可以说，作者最成功地实现了这三个目标中的最后一个，考虑到从事印度支那研究的法国学者之间的意识形态分歧，这并非易事。该书对印度支那的殖民统治进行了明确的批判，但它并不是论战性的，也没有将殖民制度的复杂性本质化或过度简化。在谈到越南民族主义的各种倾向时，作者确实更倾向于关注政治光谱中的左派而不是右派。虽然考虑到他们自己的研究兴趣和意识形态倾向，以及左派最终在越南取得胜利的历史现实，这在某种程度上是可以理解的，但如果能有一个更平衡的处理方法，那就更好了。同样，尽管书中有 "文化转型 "一章，但大部分内容都是关于政治和经济发展的，而对困扰本土精英的文化困境的关注相对较少。柬埔寨和老挝在这方面的关注特别少，但公平地说，在柬埔寨的民族主义、佛教和殖民主义之间的互动方面所做的许多重要工作都是在本书写作之后出现的。因此，尽管该书的方法可能足够 "多维"，以实现作者的第二个目标，但在文化和知识发展方面，它让读者有些不满意。
对柬埔寨和老挝的非经济发展相对缺乏仔细的关注，这意味着三个既定目标中的第一个目标，即在更广泛的 "社会和人类学空间 "中把 "印度支那 "作为一种 "历史建构 "来看待，并没有像读者希望的那样完全实现。该书在法国殖民主义的大框架内对印度支那的政策发展进行了透彻的概述，但对试图构建 "印度支那 "或 "印度支那人身份 "所涉及的具体问题却没有给予太多的关注。这一议程的复杂性和矛盾性--特别是促进越南移民进入传统上最警惕越南影响的地区--以及柬埔寨和老挝民族主义中的反越和反法因素之间的相互作用，都是值得关注的问题，而不是在大多数 "印度支那 "研究中得到的关注，包括本报告。作者认为，"一些越南人最终，至少在几十年内，也认为自己是'印度支那人'，"但他们并没有彻底研究这一说法的含义（第378页）。
不过，尽管如此，布罗休和赫梅利确实成功地表明了法国对印度支那的殖民化在许多方面是 "模棱两可的"，这一点令人钦佩。他们在序言中非常清楚和准确地阐述了这些模糊之处。"被殖民者对殖民化所强加的创新的占有，......一旦情况允许，统治模式的可逆性，以及......被征服社会对这些模式的微妙投资，他们重新引导和转移这些模式"（第xv页）。他们特别注意到 "现代性 "和 "现代化 "作为殖民统治的产物的极其模糊的性质。当然，这些都不是印度支那的特殊殖民经历所独有的，但作者确实对这些问题在这一特定背景下的表现方式提供了一个坚实而清晰的概述。
虽然这本重要的书有一个英文版当然很有价值，但不幸的是，翻译本身至少可以说是平庸的。它读起来好像是由一个翻译程序完成的，该程序尽可能地贴近原始法语语法，并自动选择英语中的法语同源词，无论它们是否是最好的等价物。欺骗性的相似同义词被称为 "假朋友"（faux amis）是有原因的，而且这本书从头到尾都充斥着假朋友。在一些情况下，翻译是非常简单的错误（如 "高级专员 "为 "hauts fonctionnaires"，意思是高级公务员，或 "genius "为 "génie"，在上下文中指超自然实体的 "精神"）。诚然，学术法语是一项艰巨的挑战，但如果要翻译，那么最终产品就不应该是一个听起来好像是由法语母语者写的直译。
如果对这篇评论有更多的讨论，你可以通过网络访问，网址：https://networks.h-net.org/h-histgeog。
引用。布鲁斯-洛克哈特。对Brocheux, Pierre; Hémery, Daniel, Indochina的评论。一个模糊的殖民化，1858-1954。H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.April, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32844
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Pierre Brocheux, Daniel Hémery. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xv + 490 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-24539-6.
Reviewed by Bruce Lockhart (Department of History, National University of Singapore)
Published on H-HistGeog (April, 2011)
Commissioned by Eva M. Stolberg (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Unraveling the Ambiguities of Colonial Indochina
Indochine: La colonisation ambiguë, 1858-1954 (Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization) is one of the most important and authoritative studies of colonial Indochina to have appeared in any language, and it is now available to an English-language audience. Authored by Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, two of the foremost historians of colonial Vietnam, the book (first published in French in 1995) is one of only a small number of academic monographs to look at colonial Indochina as a single entity and one of the very few to combine political, economic, and social perspectives. Like most studies of Indochina, the book devotes the bulk of its discussion to Vietnam, but there is enough information on Cambodia and Laos--some of it added to the English translation based on recent scholarship--to make the study reasonably “Indochina-wide.” Although the strong emphasis on quantitative data means that the text is more liberally sprinkled with numbers than some readers might want in a book that is not strictly speaking an economic history, the facts and figures are well integrated into a broader narrative of the colonial era from start to finish.
Brocheux and Hémery in their preface lay down several principal objectives for the book. First, they “have chosen to approach Indochina as a historical construct ... rooted ... within the tensions and dynamics of the social and anthropological space of the peninsula.” Second, as noted above, they “approach Indochina through its multiple dimensions--political and military, economic, social, and cultural--and various temporalities,” including both the period of colonial rule and “the brief, violent ruptures of decolonization.” Finally, they attempt to transcend the dichotomy between a “colonial” historiographical perspective, which treats French rule as “fundamentally civilizing, even if faulty,” and an anticolonial and national one, which portrays it as “purely dominating, repressive, and exploitative” (pp. xiv-xv).
The authors are arguably the most successful in achieving the last of these three objectives, no mean feat considering the ideological divide among French academics working on Indochina. The book is an articulate critique of colonial rule in Indochina, yet it is not polemical, and it does not essentialize or oversimplify the complexities of the colonial system. When it comes to the various strains of Vietnamese nationalism, the authors do tend to focus more on the Left of the political spectrum than on the Right. Although this is to some extent understandable given their own particular research interests and ideological proclivities and the historical reality that the Left was ultimately triumphant in Vietnam, a more balanced treatment would have been welcome. Similarly, despite the presence of a chapter entitled “Cultural Transformations,” much of the text is devoted to political and economic developments, with comparatively little attention to the cultural dilemmas that plagued the indigenous elites. Cambodia and Laos are given particularly short shrift in this respect, but to be fair, much of the important work done on the interaction among nationalism, Buddhism, and colonialism in Cambodia has appeared since the book was written. Thus although the book’s approach is perhaps sufficiently “multi-dimensional” to fulfill the second of the authors’ stated objectives, it leaves the reader somewhat unsatisfied where cultural and intellectual developments are concerned..
The relative lack of careful attention to noneconomic developments in Cambodia and Laos means that the first of the three stated objectives, to look at “Indochina” as a “historical construct” within its broader “social and anthropological space,” is not pursued as completely as the reader might wish. The book provides a thorough overview of policy developments in Indochina within the broader framework of French colonialism, but there is not much attention to the specific issues involved in attempting to construct “Indochina” or an “Indochinese identity.” The complexities and contradictions of this agenda--notably the promotion of Vietnamese immigration into the areas traditionally most wary of Vietnamese influence--and the interplay between anti-Vietnamese and anti-French elements in Cambodian and Lao nationalism are matters that deserve more attention than they receive in most studies of “Indochina,” including this one. The authors argue that “a number of Vietnamese ended up, at least for several decades, also thinking of themselves as ‘Indochinese,’” but they do not thoroughly examine the implications of that claim (p. 378)..
That said, however, Brocheux and Hémery do succeed admirably in their determination to show the many ways in which French colonization of Indochina was “ambiguous.” They articulate these ambiguities quite clearly and accurately in their preface: “the appropriation by the colonized of the innovations imposed by colonization,... the reversibility of modes of domination as soon as circumstances permitted them, and ... the subtle investment in these modes on the part of subjugated societies who redirected and deflected them” (p. xv). They pay particular attention to the extremely ambiguous nature of “modernity” and “modernization” as a product of colonial rule. None of these, of course, are unique to the particular colonial experience of Indochina, but the authors do provide a solid and articulate overview of the ways in which these issues played out in this particular context.
Although it is certainly valuable to have an English edition of this important book, it is unfortunate that the translation itself is mediocre to say the least. It reads as if it had been done by a translation program that stuck as closely as possible to the original French syntax and automatically chose French cognates in English whether or not they were the best equivalents. There is a good reason why deceptively similar cognates are called “faux amis” (false friends), and the text is riddled with them from start to finish. In a few cases the translations are quite simply wrong (such as “high commissioners” for “hauts fonctionnaires,” meaning high-ranking civil servants, or “genius” for “génie” in a context where it means “spirit” in the sense of a supernatural entity). Academic French is admittedly a difficult challenge, but if it is going to be translated, then the final product should not be a literal translation that sounds as if it had been written by a native French speaker.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-histgeog.
Citation: Bruce Lockhart. Review of Brocheux, Pierre; Hémery, Daniel, Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. April, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32844
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