Dr. Tam Ngo

Tam Ngo was a Research Fellow at the Institute. She studied religious change, dialogues between spiritualism and science, and memory politics in post-war late socialist Vietnam and China using anthropological methods and discourse analysis. A podcast about her first book, “The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam” (Seattle, 2016) can be listened here. A review of it can be read here. She is writing her second monograph, provisionally titled “The Unclaimed War: The 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War. Memory politics in Vietnam and China”. She received a Senior VIDI grant (2020-2024) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for a research project on the use of spiritual and DNA forensics to find and identify war dead in Vietnam and its implications for the country‘s reconciliation politics. She has recruited one Post-doctoral Fellow and two Ph.D. students for this project. 

Research projects

• Between a rock and a hard place: Sinophobia and religious nationalist sentiments in Vietnam (completed)
• North-South by East-West (with Peter van der Veer) (completed)
• The unclaimed war: the social memory of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese Border War in China and Vietnam (completed)
• Bones of contention: technologies of identification and the politics of reconciliation in Vietnam (completed)
• Spiritual heritage and the question of post-war reconciliation in Vietnam (completed)

Publications

Books

Ngo, T. (2016). The new way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Link

Collected Editions

Ngo, T., & Buck Quijada, J. (Eds.). (2015). Atheist secularism and its discontents: A comparative study of religion and communism in Eurasia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Link

Contributions to a Collected edition

Ngo, T., & Mai, N. T. T. (2021). In search of a Vietnamese Buddhist space in Germany. In B. Meyer, & P. van der Veer (Eds.), Refugees and religion: Ethnographic studies of global trajectories (pp. 105-122). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Link

Ngo, T. T. T. (2019). The Uncle Hồ Religion in Vietnam. In P. van der Veer, & K. Dean (Eds.), The secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia (pp. 215-237). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Link

Ngo, T. (2015). Dealing with the dragon: Urban planning in Hanoi. In P. van der Veer (Ed.), Handbook of religion and the Asian city: Aspiration and urbanization in the twenty-first century (pp. 186-200). California: University of California Press. Link

Ngo, T., & Buck Quijada, J. (2015). Introduction: Atheist secularism and its discontents. In T. Ngo, & J. Buck Quijada (Eds.), Atheist secularism and its discontents: A comparative study of religion and communism in Eurasia (pp. 1-26). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Link

van der Veer, P., Ngo, T., & Smyer Yu, D. (2015). Religion and peace in Asia. In R. S. Appleby, D. Little, & A. Omer (Eds.), Oxford handbook of religion, conflict, and peacebuilding (pp. 407-429). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Link

Ngo, T. (2009). The short-waved Faith: Christian Broadcastings and the Transformation of the Spiritual Landscape of the Hmong in Northern Vietnam. In K. F. Lim (Ed.), Mediated Piety: Technology and Religion in Contemporary Asia (pp. 139-158). Leiden: Brill Verlag. Link

Journal Articles

Ngo, T. (2021). Bones of contention: Situating the dead of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war.  American Ethnologist (AE). Link

Ngo, T. (2021). Conspicuous performances: ritual competition between Christian and non-Christian Hmong in contemporary Vietnam. Social Anthropology, 29(3), 733-747. Link

Ngo, T. T. T. (2019). Dynamics of memory and religious nationalism in a Sino-Vietnamese border town. Modern Asian studies. Link

Ngo, T. (2016). The new way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam.Voice from around the world, 2016(2). Link

Ngo, T. (2015). Missionary encounters at the China-Vietnam border: The case of the Hmong. Cultural Diversity in China, 1(1), 68-83. Link

Ngo, T. (2015). Protestant conversion and social conflict: The case of the Hmong in contemporary Vietnam. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 46(2), 274-292. Link

Ngo, T. (2011). Missionary encounters at the China-Vietnam border: the case of the Hmong. Encounters, 4, 113-131. Link

Ngo, T. (2010). Ethnic and Transnational Dimensions of Recent Protestant Conversion among the Hmong in Northern Vietnam. Social Compass, 57(3), 332-344. Link

Working Papers

Ngo, T. (2009). The “short-waved” faith: Christian broadcasting and Protestant conversion of the Hmong in Vietnam. MMG Working Paper, 09-11. Link

Other

Ngo, T. (2019). Identificatie oorlogsslachtoffers rijt Vietnamese wonden open. De Volkskrant. Link