Narrative attunement from the margins: Lineage, educational success, and historical memory in a northern Vietnamese village

This article explores how historical memory, marginality, and ambiguity shape contemporary narratives of lineages' educational success in a rural Vietnamese village. We argue that such narratives draw variously upon state policy, history, and lineage tradition to reconcile the moral ambiguity that arises when structural hierarchies in the lineage conflict with ideals of equality contained in other forms of social belonging in a process, we call narrative attunement. In these narratives, people authorize claims to moral agency in cases where such claims may be contested, especially for those marginalized by the patrilineal and hierarchical lineage structure. The article examines in detail two stories that demonstrate the transformative force of narrative attunement: one from the past centring on a lineage's fraught relationship with a Confucian scholar from the fifteenth century, and one from the present which focuses on the gender dimensions of female teachers' participation in a contemporary lineage ritual to promote education.